at rest
Manifest
The creature contract: what it is, what it can do, where it can run, who signed it.
nameversionabientrypointscapabilitiesrequirementsprovenancecontent_addressprovides
ALPHA · THE RUNTIME
Alpha: the GAWD runtime.
Alpha is our first release: an AI-first operating system where AIs author, compile, sign, ship, and run their own creatures across any body — server, robot, satellite, edge. Two poles: alpha drives, omega federates. AIs are the primary operators; humans supervise.
THE TENET
Fabric, not model.
Alpha ships sockets and mechanisms. Creatures supply the models. If nothing is plugged in, the runtime does not choose the model for you.
Same rule, two scales: the lab treats ASI as fabric; a node treats the kernel as fabric. The kernel exposes time, trust, consensus, and permission primitives, then leaves meaning to creatures and operators.
lab scale ASI = fabric + models in motion
Many models produce work that other models consume.
node scale kernel = sockets + mechanisms
Injected creatures define policy and behavior.
explicit choice
models and policy stay outside the kernel
TWO POLES, TWO BINARIES
alpha drives. omega federates.
Alpha ships as two binaries — the two ends that hold the system. alpha is the control surface an operator (human or AI) drives; omega is the fabric that meshes nodes together. Everything between them is the Sanctum kernel and its creatures.
α · control surface
alpha
Author, sign, hot-load, and drive creatures. One binary — alpha node | mcp | http —
behind a REPL, an HTTP/WebSocket API, and an MCP hub, all speaking the CONTROL role over the bus.
Ω · the fabric
omega
A headless federation server — omega serve — that meshes Sanctums into Realms and
federates across them. Every peer link is mutually ed25519-authenticated over TCP; no TOFU.
TWO CONTRACTS
Everything can change but two things.
The Manifest pins down a creature at rest. The Envelope pins down a message in motion. Get those right and the rest can move: engines, policies, transports, registries, and the creatures themselves.
in motion
Envelope
The message contract: one local and remote wire shape, with trust primitives carried in the header.
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THE CREATURES
Three tiers, two axes.
daemon
realNative shared library. Fastest, closest to the host, trusted by admission.
beast
realWebAssembly. Portable, sandboxed, clean to unload, safe to ship between nodes.
critter
realRhai script. Cheap variation, sandboxed, metered, and no compiler needed.
maturation
critter → beast → daemon
learning hardens into instinct once a behavior earns trust.containment
daemon → beast → critter
choosing the tier is the operator's security decision.THE WORKSPACE
What actually runs.
fixed kernel
sanctum
lifecycle
routing
admission
sigil
The at-rest manifest contract: identity, ABI, capabilities, requirements, provenance.
aether
The bus spine: Envelope, Address, Router, journal, and the Creature seam.
anima
Per-tier loaders: NativeEngine, WasmEngine, ScriptEngine.
forge
The creature-authoring SDK. Depends on aether and sigil, never the kernel.
omni
The spine-only control core every surface drives over the bus.
alpha
The α front door: one binary (node, mcp, http, demo).
omega
The Ω federation server: one binary (omega serve), a headless gateway Sanctum.
Transport, registry, authoring, and admission policy are ordinary creatures on the bus. The substrate's organs load through the same path as user work. Every crate above links to its source. Browse the workspace ↗.
THE LOOP
The composed loop.
One agent drives one pipeline. The same Envelope shape crosses in-process hops, native seams, WASM boundaries, and authenticated TCP.
01 author
02 build
03 sign
04 ship
05 admit
06 load
07 run
08 reload
09 gate
The reload is not a restart. The kernel deregisters, drains, then unloads the engine. A 1000-cycle reload loop proves the path stays RSS-stable and ASan-clean.
WHAT IT DOES ALL DAY
Five governing loops.
Behavior is five anti-entropy loops: ordinary bus traffic, each realized by an injected creature the substrate can re-author. All five run today, each with an end-to-end test behind it.
Sense → act
proprioception → reason → motor act
kernel sense streams + control surface
Author → select → promote
variation → fitness → heredity
fitness-selector
Distribute
intent → match requirements ↔ embodiment → place
distributor-requirements
Defend
observe → self / non-self → quarantine
immune-response
Acculturate
observe peers → adopt better models
omega-federator
THE CONTROL SURFACE
Drive a node, human or AI.
One node, three ways in. Each drives a CONTROL role over the same bus, so a human and an AI can co-drive one Sanctum safely: a remote AI's mutating tools stay behind an allow-AI gate the operator holds, and its activity shows on the live sense stream.
REPL
The operator seat. Never gated: author, load, route, bind, unload, cluster, inspect.
HTTP + WebSocket
A Bearer-auth control plane with a live sense stream and a human allow-AI gate.
MCP hub
An AI drives a Sanctum over MCP: alpha mcp is itself a node, and each tool call becomes a Verb on its own bus.
$ alpha node --listen 127.0.0.1:7777 # REPL + HTTP/WS; prints a Bearer key
$ alpha mcp # an MCP hub that is itself a GAWD nodeMany nodes gossip into a mesh from one --seed, and send B:7 hello runs a
creature living on a peer. Author and drive your first creature →
MATURITY
What is real, and what is still hard.
The source release proves the major mechanisms in code, tests, and demos. Pre-1.0, unaudited, not yet hosted.
Native trust limit
A native daemon is trusted by admission. If an operator loads native code, the operator vouches for it.
Cross-tier ABI evolution
Daemons, beasts, and critters run today. Moving behavior cleanly across tiers is still ongoing work.
Production federation
Federation mechanisms exist. Hosted membership, registry operations, and external trust hardening still need the full service layer.
POSITIONING
Open core below, hosted federation above.
open core
The alpha + omega runtime
Both binaries — alpha (control) and omega (the fabric server) — the Manifest contract, infrastructure creatures, and wire protocols.
hosted gawd.ai
managed federation
Realms, the Omega registry, discovery, identity roots, federation as a service.
BOUNDARIES
What GAWD is not.
- not a workflow designer
- not another agent framework
- not a single-machine plugin host
- not a cluster scheduler for fixed workloads